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Chapter 1 - The Night before

"And right here, Tommy-boy, is where you'll be sleepin'." Were it not for the serenity with which Nathan outlined the hopelessness of my situation, I seriously would've thought he was joking. It had all been going so well; I hadn't even needed to place my suitcase down on the cracked concrete pavement to knock on the peeling, non-descript wood peppering the front door before it'd been hurled open, finally ending the two weeks since I'd last been given the pleasure to stare into those radiant, starlight eyes; to hear that soothing Irish tongue from the Labrador's awkwardly beautiful muzzle. It sure had seemed like an eternity, and I, for one, intended to make the most of the day-and-a-half we had together...but a good night's sleep would seriously have helped, and as my weary eyes hovered downwards before landing squarely on the filthy, termite-infested mattress with a few bundles of rags masquerading hopelessly as a duvet cascading over it, my hopes were well and truly dashed. Even my temperamental suitcase wheels came to the end of their streak of good behaviour, beginning to sporadically stick and squeak as if loudly protesting at their mere presence in this room; honestly, I couldn't blame them. But what could I say?

"Erm...thanks a lot, pal; I like your room" I blurted out, with the sentence the verbal end-result of a dramatic brain-diversion, "it's... cosy, very cosy."

"Great frikkin' job, idiot!" my brain snapped at me, but I half-turned to see Nathan stoop under the low-hanging door-frame as the ancient floorboards creaked under his matching baseball boots, and breathed a huge internal sigh of relief; he'd somehow taken it as a compliment.

"Figured you'd be O.K; you Collies used to sleep in farmhouses way back in the day, didn't ya'? Yeah, it's not great, but it's better than the last house we had, t'at's for sure!" he chuckled, concealing his sandy-beige paw within the right-hand pocket of his jeans as he jointly surveyed the singular-windowed, rectangular room; his shadow on the hazy, late-summer sun mingling intimately with mine. I had to hand it to him, though; despite the lack of space, or any viable wallpaper material, for that matter, Nathan had gone above and beyond to make it his own, plastering the peeling walls with gargantuan posters of lush, exotic landscapes, before lining the singular bookshelf joining two corners of the room with globes and maps aplenty; it was, to get to the point, an environmentalist's wet dream.

"Oh, how's the school hunt going?" I inquired, suddenly remembering the inside page of the conversation rulebook; always ask about the other person where possible. As I placed the suitcase flush to the floor, Nathan tried, and failed, to stop an incredulous chuckle from escaping his rounded jowls.

"School? You actually t'ink I wasted my time bullshittin' about me' grades just to spend the next two years o' my life at some sinkhole? Workin' at the Zoo wasn't a choice, Tommy-boy; my old school, they...eh, they'd had enough o' me, let's put it t'at way." The eyebrow concealed in the forest of black and white, marble fur above my right eye raised a few degrees at this quip; one of the first things Nathan had told me after we'd met had been his decision to drop out of school the moment he'd turned sixteen, but I'd always assumed he'd made that decision of his own accord; the fact that it'd been the school itself that'd told him to leave took me aback. I mean, what possible reason could anyone have to see the back of such a sweet-natured person?.

"But why..." I began my reassurance, and then those radiant eyes locked onto mine intently; before I knew it, the sides of my face were beginning to heat up, "O.K" I backtracked, "so that's not happening; how about a job?" I couldn't stop kicking myself for being so goddamn clichéd, but truth be told, I just wanted the inevitable "can you just spare a dollar?" question to just be gotten over; not that I would've minded at all.

"Well..." he paused with an oddly deliberate slowness, finally removing his paw from the pocket and bringing it up to his chin, "it just so happened t'at I applied for a small volunteerin' excursion last week; t' usual, ya' know, jettin' off to Peru and learnin' stuff about the ecosystems there, all while rebuildin' an old, worn-down school. Nothin' major, of course..." he hadn't even begun the final sentence before a joyous, revealing grin meandered its way across his slim muzzle; now finally able to drop the awkwardness, my jaw fell open like a clockwork toy.

"Really?!" I gasped, finally locating my vocal chords, "you never thought to tell me that, ya dork? That's...I...you're so lucky to be jetting off to Peru, ya' know that?" I grinned, as my eyes longingly gazed at the almost tangible scenery depicted in the posters. Nathan's, if anything, grew even larger; the most beautiful exuberance seemed to flow out of him in waves at the mention of this exotic location.

"I guess good things _do_come t' those who wait; workin' my arse off at the zoo had a purpose after all. I mean, it wasn't like me Pa' was gonna' help-"

"Nathan! Change the channel for me; my knees've gone again. Hurry up!" A fierce, booming middle-aged voice projected itself across the entire length of the upstairs landing, falling squarely into our floppy ears. The cloud-blocked, hazy sunshine caught on Nathan's left paw as he curled it into a tight lock against his faded, once-blue long-sleeved t-shirt, and with a strangely glum sigh, he spun on his heel and began to trod slowly out of the room.

"Make yourself at home; I'll only be a minute."

"Of-of course" I agreed readily, nodding my head copiously in confirmation as my backside dug itself against the rugged mattress in a futile attempt to find even a modicum of comfort. Though Nathan had barely touched upon his family ever since I'd met him, his reaction to the voice said more than words ever could; my previous attempts to find out anything about his Mom had been met with a quick subject change, so I'd thought better of it since then. My thought train was then briefly halted by a muffled, repetitive ring.

"You relax t'ere in that armchair" Nathan softly ordered to his Dad from downstairs, "I'll get it."

"Sigh...he'll be a bit more than a moment" I chuckled, as Nathan's distinctively light footfall bounded down the stairs, "hmn, familiarising myself with Peru might not be such a bad idea..."

?

Looks could often be deceiving, but annoyingly, my mattress was not such a case; I could twist and contort my body all I liked, but try as I might, I couldn't evade the pop-up springs and lumps that dug irritatingly into my fur, pummelling it this way and that in a constant cycle. Worse still, it forced my mind to cling on to a single, infuriating thought; one that I'd somehow managed to supress earlier in the evening through a surprisingly delicious chilli Nathan had cooked himself, numerous games of cards, none of which I'd won, before finally settling down on the living room's moth-eaten sofa to absorb the entirety of Jurassic Park. Thing was, no matter how much I tried to convince myself that what my Mom didn't know wouldn't hurt her, the fact remained that while he may've been six months beyond consent age, I had over half that time left to go; even the existence of only a single parent in the house couldn't whisk all clouds of doubt from my turbulent mind. Safe to say I was quietly thankful for Nath's decision that I should sleep in a separate bed, though now I think about it, any bed could be enlivened by the presence of a hot, sixteen-year-old Labrador wrapping that tender muzzle around my-

"Shame about the Zoo, isn't it?" I sighed in a desperate attempt to snap my brain out of that infuriatingly tantilising image, "to think what they were doing to those poor animals behind people's backs. Heck, we worked there and even we didn't know they were...argh, just, how could they?" The double bed creaked and moaned in protest, with the moonlight-touched outline of Nathan's distinct muzzle popping into view from the far-right corner of my vision.

"Well just be glad t'ey got what was comin' to 'em; those animals are better off back in the wild t'an cooped up in a dingy cage anyways. I'm just glad t' see the back of t'at wretched place."

"I guess" by this stage, I was so close to sleep that my voice echoed weightlessly around my ears, almost detaching itself from my vocal chords, "anyways, I'm hammered; see ya' tomorrow buddy."

"T'morrow's anot'er day and all that" he chortled, shifting his body to snuggle into a mattress no doubt a world apart from mine. Yet even with a loud bout of snoring just five minutes after he'd settled down, I somehow managed to shut out all other noises, finally rocking the bed into submission before grimly wrapping myself in the cossetting world of sleep.